The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
man whom the soldiers had suffered for. They were kind, sad men, muttering ‘hallo’ from their chipped formica dinner tables and waiting for an acknowledgement before they smiled. ‘Jang good?’ one asked pathetically in the corridor. Was war ‘good’? ‘Saddam finished,’ came another darkened voice. ‘Welcome to Iran.’
A hundred kilometres north of Ahwaz, we had stopped at Shushtar, and on a windy platform Labelle and I fell into conversation with a civil engineer who tried to grasp the distance that separated him from his own countrymen. ‘I do not understand these people who say they want to die. I never knew people like this. These people say that if Khomeini wants them to die, they will die. What can you say to these people?’
The train pulled out of Shushtar late, its diesel engine roaring. And then, quite suddenly, our train climbed into a narrow valley and through the open window there were sheer-faced mountains with white peaks and ice glistening on the rock face, frozen rivers and stars. Just briefly, as we wound round a remote village, I saw a man and a woman standing on the roof of their home looking at us. His arm lay round her shoulders and she had no veil and her hair hung loosely over her shoulders. An ominous ridge – Zard Kho, a soldier said it was called, ‘Yellow Mountain’ – towered over our train as it wormed its way through tunnels and along the river bends so tightly that you could see the locomotive’s lamp far to the right as it illuminated the boulders and the dark torrents beneath. Here was a land for which these young men might be prepared to die. But for the man in the faded photograph in the buffet car? Yet the soldiers rarely looked out of the windows. A few read magazines, others smoked with their eyes closed, one read a tiny Koran, mouthing the words in silence.
There was an Ahwaz man on the train, a merchant going up to Tehran for a day, a round-faced, tubby figure who bemoaned his economic prospects but said that, yes, he was better off since the revolution because his family had become more religious. What did he think of the war? The man pondered this for a while, staring out at the moonlit waterfalls of the Bala Rud river, an innocent stream which – like most of the soldiers on the train – would eventually make its way down to the mud of the Shatt al-Arab. ‘I think the Americans are behind it,’ he said from the gloom of the corridor. ‘The great powers want us to be weak but we will win the war.’ And the price? I asked him. The train heaved itself through a station with a white nameplate that announced a village called Tchamsangar. The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the compartments of slumbering young men. ‘They will pay the price,’ he said. Then he looked out at the stars and mountains and ice, and he added: ‘We will all pay the price. We can afford it.’
Who would have believed that the United States would be flying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran? I should have done. Back in Lebanon, I had been trying, through the help of an Iranian intermediary, to secure the release of my colleague Terry Anderson, who had been held hostage by a satellite group of the Shia Muslim Hizballah movement for more than a year. Anderson was the Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut and my best friend in the city; his apartment was in the same building as mine and we had travelled together on many hair-raising assignments.* The Iranians had started by demanding that I discover the whereabouts of three of their citizens taken hostage in Lebanon in 1982. But when I met with the Iranian intermediary at a Beirut restaurant in late May 1986, he bluntly told me that ‘his [Anderson’s] people are in Tehran’. I did not take this seriously. Only five years after the release of the US embassy hostages in Tehran, no US officials would travel to Iran.
I was wrong; doubly so. For quite by chance, I had stumbled onto the first evidence of the arms-for-hostages Iran – contra scandal in September 1985 when – passing through Cyprus en route from Cairo to Beirut – an old friend who worked in air traffic control at Larnaca airport tipped me off that a mysterious aircraft flying from Tabriz in northern Iran had been reported missing after it had passed over Turkey and suddenly turned south. My contact told me that Tel Aviv officials had personally telephoned the Cypriot air traffic controllers to confirm that the DC-8 cargo jet was safe on the ground at Ben Gurion airport after suffering ‘electrical failures’.
Officially, however, the Israelis denied any knowledge of the aircraft – a sure sign that the plane was on a secret mission – and when the machine’s purported American owners claimed in Miami that they had sold the aircraft the previous month to a Nigerian company, my interest only grew. The DC-8, bearing the US registration number N421AJ, had identified itself to air traffic controllers as belonging to ‘International Airlines’. The plane had originally filed a flight plan to Malaga in Spain, where a friendly airport official said that, although no DC-8 had been seen there, a Boeing 707 – also claiming to belong to ‘International Airlines’ – had touched down on 15 September from Tabriz and then taken off en route to another Iranian town which he said was called ‘Zal’ – although no one was able to identify this location.
Even when I first learned of these unorthodox flights, I should have been more suspicious. If Israel was sending or receiving freight aircraft to or from Iran, it was not exporting oranges or importing caviar. And as Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, Washington must have been involved. Had I connected this with the unexpected admission from my Iranian source that Anderson’s ‘people’ were in Tehran, I might have ‘broken’ the Iran – Contra story. But it was a low-circulation magazine in Beirut, Al-Shiraa, which did that and the rest – to use the veteran cliché – is history. A naive group of White House officials inspired by the gullible but handsome Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North – egged on by Israeli middlemen – persuaded President Reagan that American hostages in Beirut could be freed by Iran’s surrogate allies in the Hizballah in return for a large supply of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles and TOW antitank weapons to Iran. Part payment for these arms – which breached Washington’s arms embargo on Iran – would fund the right-wing Contra gunmen in Nicaragua whom Reagan and North so admired.
I had first heard North’s name three months earlier when, travelling to Switzerland on an MEA flight out of Beirut, I found myself sitting next to Ahmed Chalabi, the senior financial adviser to Nabih Berri, the leader of the Shia Muslim Amal guerrilla movement in Beirut.* Berri had just managed to arrange the release of the passengers and crew of a TWA airliner that had been hijacked to Lebanon and Chalabi repeatedly told me that Berri was worth supporting because ‘the alternative is Hizballah and that is too awful to contemplate.’ We had only been in the air for twenty minutes when he said: ‘Robert, there’s someone I’d like you to meet in Washington. His name’s Oliver North.’ A sixth sense, partly induced by my distrust of Chalabi, led me to decline his invitation. But Chalabi must have talked of me to North who – under a scheduled mid-1986 meeting in his diary with Chuck Lewis, an AP staffer in Washington – wrote with his usual flair for inaccuracy ‘Robert Fiske’. Some days later, Lewis called me in Beirut and asked if I would like to take a call from the Colonel. I refused.
North’s secret trip to Tehran with former US National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane from 25 to 28 May 1986 – a ridiculous but outrageously funny pastiche in which the Americans failed to realise they were participating in a hostage bazaar – did grave damage to the Reagan presidency and to America’s relations with the Arab world. For a complete account of this folly, readers must turn to the Tower Commission report on the scandal; but for years afterwards, details of the clandestine weapons deals, in which ‘sterilised’ – unmarked – Israeli aircraft flew missiles into Tabriz and Bandar Abbas airports, continued to emerge. Among the most revealing – because they demonstrate Iran’s desperation at the very moment when they had just captured Fao – were extracts from telephone calls between Oliver North in Frankfurt and an unnamed Iranian government adviser in late February 1986. Tapes of these calls were made available to America’s ABC television in October 1991, and appeared to have been recorded in Israel.
At one point, North appeals for the release of an American hostage in Beirut prior to any further delivery of weapons. Through an interpreter, the Iranian replies: ‘We must get the Hawk missiles. We must get intelligence reports of Iraqi troops strength. Iran is being destroyed. We need those missiles.’ At another point, North, trying to smother the reality of the guns-for-hostage arrangement, tells Iranian officials that ‘if your government can cause